Why motor neurons die in ALS largely remains a mystery. In a study funded by The ALS Association, Dr. Anne Hart, professor of neuroscience at the Carney Institute for Brain Science at Brown University, and her colleagues gained insight into why some types of motor neurons die, while other don’t. A paper about the study was recently published in PLOS Genetics.

Meet Dr. James Shorter, professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He and his team work tirelessly in the lab to better understand the causes of ALS, so those causes can be translated into potential therapeutic targets. The ALS Association has proudly funded him since 2014.

Dr. Emily Plowman, one of our Clinical Management Grant awardees, recently published a promising case report on a person with early-stage ALS who has been participating in a mild-intensity respiratory strength training program. The individual has been doing the strength training program with Dr. Plowman and her team at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida, over the past 24 months.

Yesterday, MediciNova, Inc. announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) relayed positive feedback regarding its phase III clinical trial plan to test MN-166 (ibudilast) in a broad population of people with ALS. No safety issues were raised by the FDA and safety will be revisited when results are available in the phase III trial.

Yesterday, ITF Pharma, Inc. announced that Tiglutik™, the first and only thickened liquid form of riluzole, was approved by the FDA for the treatment of ALS. This formulation contrasts with the oral pill form of riluzole that has been on the market for ALS for more than 20 years.

By the beginning of 2019, three trials are slated to be underway to help develop antisense therapy for people with ALS, dividends on a bold investment The ALS Association made in 2004, when the technology was new. We sat down with Dr. Don Cleveland, a pioneer in the field, for the second part of our series highlighting antisense technology.

When Dr. Timothy Miller and his colleagues from Washington University in St. Louis published preclinical data in The Journal of Clinical Investigation last month, showing how second-generation antisense drugs were effective in ALS mouse and rat models, it served as a vivid reminder that every research investment and discovery adds up.

The ALS Association and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (“Teva”) have announced the recipients of the TEVA CNS Target Identification Crowdsourcing Challenge awards for their outstanding proposals to identify novel ALS targets. The two awards will be granted to Dr. Philip Wong, along with Dr. Jonathan C. Grima and Dr. Jeffrey D. Rothstein, all from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.

Biopharmaceutical company Orphazyme A/S launched a phase III clinical trial of arimoclomol, giving a dose to a person with ALS for the first time, the company announced recently. The randomized and placebo-controlled trial will enroll 231 people with ALS in North America and Europe to determine efficacy and safety of the oral drug.

Dr. Rahul Desikan is incredible. He’s a prominent researcher of neurodegenerative diseases, including ALS, as well as a loyal husband, father, son, and friend. And on February 17, 2017, in a cruel twist of fate, he became a person with ALS.

We recently announced that we’re providing new funding to allow GNS Healthcare to use artificial intelligence (AI) to create a comprehensive disease model to advance research into ALS. GNS Healthcare will use its powerful machine learning platform, called REFS, in conjunction with the rich Answer ALS patient datasets, which are accessible to clinicians and scientists throughout the ALS research community. The project will be led by Dr. Iya Khalil, chief commercial officer and co-founder of GNS Healthcare.

Research funded by The ALS Association helped develop the first mouse model that specifically expresses poly(GR), a type of dipeptide repeat protein associated with C9orf72, which uncovered a new ALS disease pathway. Dr. Leonard Petrucelli’s group at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, recently published the research in Nature Medicine.

Dr. Marka Van Blitterswijk from the Mayo Clinic Jacksonville is a scientist and one of our former Milton Safenowitz postdoctoral fellows. Since moving on from the program, she has established her own ALS lab as an assistant professor. We recently awarded her a prestigious multi-year grant surrounding her biomarker work.

The ALS Association is proud to have supported the development of bright, young scientists through the Milton Safenowitz Postdoctoral Fellowship program since 2004. The Safenowitz family, through our Greater New York Chapter, founded the program in memory of Milton Safenowitz, who died of ALS in 1998.

Since our founding in 1985, we have put collaboration at the forefront of everything we do. The gift of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge in August 2014 gave us the unique opportunity to up our game in establishing innovative research partnerships around the world.

In the May 2018 issue of Frontiers in Neuroscience, current The ALS Association-funded researchers, Drs. J. Paul Taylor and Maria Purice of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, published a comprehensive mini-review describing disease pathways that cause ALS, with a focus on mutations in RNA-binding proteins.

Frustrated with the limited availability of assistive technology devices for his mother, who was diagnosed with ALS, Dexter Ang quit his finance job, partnered with David Cipoletta, an underwater robotic engineer, and set to work developing technologies that could universally, massively, and quickly improve the quality of life for people living with ALS.

Before the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, The ALS Association allocated $6 million annually to funding ALS research. After the ALS IBC, the Association has budgeted about $18 million per year to research and has so far committed $84 million to ALS research. From this investment, there has been massive payoff in a significant increase in ALS gene discoveries.

We are joined today by Dr. Stephen Goutman, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Michigan and the director of Michigan Medicine’s ALS Center of Excellence and Multidisciplinary ALS Clinic. The clinic was recently awarded an ALS Association Clinical Management grant to support Dr. Goutman’s important study aimed at improving non-invasive ventilation for people with ALS through the use of custom-printed 3D masks.

Today, we are happy to be joined by Dr. Megan McCain, an assistant professor of Biomedical Engineering and Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at the University of Southern California (USC), an ALS researcher who recently received an investigator-initiated starter grant award from The ALS Association. These awards are designed to help bright researchers start their own labs to answer their own innovative questions addressing ALS disease.